With increasing use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) model for managing organizational interactions with customers, organizations have to work with and rely on a great deal of CRM data to continue to be successful in their respective fields. For example, representatives at organizations have to continuously review and manipulate CRM data to perform, organize, and promote various areas of business, such as sales, marketing, customer service, human resources, etc. However, today's reporting systems are greatly limited in forms and options of reporting they offer and often require a user (e.g., accountant, sales representative, human resource manager, system administrator, etc.) at an organization (e.g., business, company, etc.) to separately and individually deal with multiple reports in order to have multiple views or sets of data which is time-consuming, resource-consuming, and error-prone.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches.
In conventional database systems, users access their data resources in one logical database. A user of such a conventional system typically retrieves data from and stores data on the system using the user's own systems. A user system might remotely access one of a plurality of server systems that might in turn access the database system. Data retrieval from the system might include the issuance of a query from the user system to the database system. The database system might process the request for information received in the query and send to the user system information relevant to the request. The secure and efficient retrieval of accurate information and subsequent delivery of this information to the user system has been and continues to be a goal of administrators of database systems. Unfortunately, conventional database approaches are associated with various limitations.